Measuring the Useful Field of View During Simulated Driving With Gaze-Contingent Displays
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Summary
This study addresses the limitations of existing measures for the Useful Field of View (UFOV), which is the area from which an observer can extract visual information during a single fixation. While UFOV is correlated with driving performance and crash risk, traditional measures rely on tachistoscopic displays with enforced fixation or fixed-location stimuli, making them unsuitable for measuring transient, moment-to-moment changes in realistic simulated environments. The authors aimed to develop and test a novel gaze-contingent UFOV (GC-UFOV) paradigm capable of assessing dynamic UFOV changes due to cognitive load in a simulated driving context. The researchers employed a DriveSafety desktop driving simulator with eye-tracking technology to present gaze-contingent displays. Twenty-five participants completed four simulated drives while performing an occasional Gabor orientation discrimination task. Gabor patches appeared randomly at three retinal eccentricities (5°, 10°, or 15°) relative to the participant’s current fixation, ensuring controlled eccentricity regardless of eye movement. Cognitive workload was manipulated in two ways: via a concurrent auditory two-back working memory task and by introducing lateral wind to increase driving difficulty. Individual discrimination thresholds were calibrated prior to the experiment to account for natural declines in visual acuity with eccentricity, allowing the study to isolate attentional effects from sensory limits. The results demonstrated that the GC-UFOV method successfully detected transient changes in UFOV. Cognitive workload significantly reduced Gabor discrimination accuracy, confirming the measure’s sensitivity to attentional fluctuations. Crucially, this accuracy cost was equivalent across all three retinal eccentricities, supporting a “general interference” account rather than a “tunnel vision” account, which would have predicted greater degradation at further eccentricities. The driving difficulty manipulation (lateral wind) did not significantly affect discrimination accuracy, though it did increase lateral lane position variability. Additionally, participants exhibited less variable lane keeping under high cognitive workload, consistent with previous simulator studies. The significance of this work lies in the validation of the GC-UFOV paradigm as a novel, effective tool for studying UFOV in complex, real-world tasks. By overcoming the limitations of fixed-location stimuli and enforced fixation, this method allows for the measurement of situation-dependent, moment-to-moment changes in visual attention. This capability provides deeper insights into how cognitive load affects situational awareness during driving, offering a more ecologically valid approach to understanding the specific dangers associated with degraded UFOV and potential strategies for mitigation.
Key finding
Increased cognitive workload caused equivalent decrements in visual discrimination accuracy across all retinal eccentricities, supporting a general interference model of UFOV degradation rather than tunnel vision.
Methodology
simulator
Sample size: 25
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via openalex on 2026-05-07 (2 acquisition events logged).
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-07 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 8 | 2026-06-06 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | openalex | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-08 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-07 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified_with_issues.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- useful field of view
- visual occlusion
- peripheral attention
- workload measurement
- road complexity
- mental demand
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Methodological Resource: measurement protocol, tool software
- Theoretical Contribution: theory or model